The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [115]
I’ve always loved Worcester’s quayside path from Diglis, as much under grey skies and winter floods as on a bright-green May evening. In fact, the regular floods were probably my favourite, because this often meant sport would be cancelled, if the school playing fields on the opposite bank were under water too (although still firmly in the bottom group, I’d graduated by now from Diglis Rec). It was no guarantee, however. Frequently, we were sent wading along the towpath, through fast, filthy water, in order to reach the bridge and the other side. Various sports teachers seemed to compete in just how high they would allow the water to be before grudgingly calling off the afternoon’s running around. A quite terrifying thigh-high was deemed acceptable by some of the more Neanderthal members of staff – almost inevitably, the ones who also taught geography. I don’t think there ever was a member of the geography department who didn’t teach sport as well; it was obviously deemed the softest touch for the intellectually compromised, a fact that always rankled in me. You never found a PE teacher in the physics lab.
Down by the Water Gate, from where the cathedral ferry plied across to the other side (a practice occasionally revived lately), there are numerous plaques and carved stones in the sandstone wall, recording the maximum height of various Severn floods since 1672. Despite the breathless insistence that our water levels are rising and that floods will be both more frequent and more deadly, the wall stoically refuses to confirm or deny it. 1672, two days before Christmas, was the first mark, and it is still the highest, well over six feet above the towpath. Then, in order, come 1947, 2007 and 1886. Global-warning sirens could doubtless find a pattern there to alarm us. Those who believe the exact opposite probably could too.
The difference between the Severn and the Thames can best be seen in the towns and cities that line their banks. The Thames, Father of the nation, comes to its triumphal climax through London, after having watered mellow Cotswold burghs, rich and plump as far back as the medieval wool trade, the dreaming spires of Oxford, luscious market towns like Abingdon, Henley and Windsor, and the capital’s most prestigious outer burbs, such as Richmond and Kew. With the sole exception of unlovely Reading, it is a 200-mile thread of luxury, desirability and the most consistently expensive property in the land.
Not so the Severn, its supposedly senior sister. The Thames spends the nation’s cash, while the Severn earns it. The great riverside palaces of the Thames – Kelmscott, Cliveden, Windsor Castle, Hampton Court, Ham House, Westminster itself and Greenwich – are the epicentres of power and prestige. Its Severnside equivalents – Elmore, Ashleworth, Chaceley, Ribbesford, Dowles Manor, Dudmaston Hall, Attingham, Powis – are new money incarnate, the homes of industrialists and chancers, those destined never quite to make the grade. And although there are plenty of handsome towns along the route of the Severn, almost all are a little blowsy and chipped around the edges, battered by successive waves of wealth and poverty. The river’s three great county towns – Shrewsbury, Worcester and Gloucester – have many handsome corners, but often laid cheek-by-jowl with dereliction and some truly grotty post-war development. One of Britain’s most handsome Georgian streets, Bridge Street in Worcester, is a fine case in point: the classically proportioned houses thick with grime and dust from three lanes of traffic hurtling down to the main city bridge.
After a night at a farmhouse B&B to the north of Worcester, Dad and I walked the last section home. In the distance, we could hear the thrum of traffic on the main A449 dual carriageway, a road we’d both ploughed up and down thousands of times. For ten years, I’d commuted to school every day